


All I Feel is Unrequited

by Blakpaw



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Depressed/broken character, Feels, Unrequited Love, it doesnt have a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-25 02:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10754685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blakpaw/pseuds/Blakpaw
Summary: Joker feels nothing.Batman makes him fall in love.





	All I Feel is Unrequited

The day everything came crashing down onto his reality he felt hollow. Truly entirely hollow. An empty walking husk who couldn’t stop laughing long enough to cry, because something had takeing root in the empty husk of his body and called it home. Something dark, and twisted, and gnarled. And he did not feel anything, no matter how wide he smiled or how loud he laughed he felt nothing.

 

He felt nothing the first time he strangled a man to death in an alleyway.

 

He felt nothing the first time he slit a woman's throat and watched her gurgle to death.

 

He felt nothing the first time he beat a boy to death with a brick.

 

He felt nothing the first time he set off an explosive in a mass of pedestrians.

 

He felt nothing the first time he tortured a man to death.

 

He felt nothing no matter how hard he laughed.

 

And then he felt /something/. He felt something when the bat came crashing down into his life, all fists and fury, and he felt something. He felt joy, he felt fear, he felt anger, he felt alive. Alive, staring into the mask of the man he last saw before being engulfed in burning acids, his smile more genuine then it had been in months. Then the nothingness came again, grabbed onto his sole the instant he was dragged away from the Batman in his cell in Arkham for the first time. He once again felt nothing.

 

He felt nothing the first time they beat him.

He felt nothing the first time he bit a nurse's finger off.

 

He felt nothing the first time they shoved pills down his throat.

 

He felt nothing the first time they locked him in solitary.

 

He felt nothing the first time they shocked him to hell and back.

 

He felt nothing no matter how wide he smiled.

 

He felt something when he filled the walls with blood red bats, and ghastly depictions of the man who had watched him fall over the edge. He felt something, staring into the blank ghastly eyes of a blood red Batman, scribbled furiously on the wall made with the blood from under his nails. The angry gnarled tree growing in his hollow form pulsed with life and feeling when he thought anything about the Bat, good or bad. He escaped three months after first being in Arkham, he escaped chasing after the hunger for feeling, and he found it in a kevlar covered fist cracking against his jaw, and a heavy knee slamming into his legs, sending him toppling. He laughed and laugh and laughed the entire time, and smiled at the beast disguised man, smiled as fists bruised into his ribs, smiled as knees dug into his stomach, smiled as his body was flung across the room with ease.

 

And once again he was damned to the nothingness. Forever the nothingness would grasp at him, lurk just over his shoulder and be ready to fill up his insides once again. He would feel nothing as he drew Harleen to her doom, he would feel nothing condemning Jason to death, he would feel nothing shooting Barbra, or kidnaping Gordon. He would feel nothing until the Bat arrived, strength and danger, and most importantly full of anger. Anger that he used on the Joker, anger he eagerly absorbed into his skin in the form of bruises and cuts, which he would nurse and croon over, because they made him feel something.

 

They made him feel /love/.

 

Love that made him coo and purr, and rub his cheek against dried blood Bats, and kiss at tiny cuts. Love that made him cry out into the night for more, that made him laugh with genuine joy. Love that made him sick with warmth, and that made him sad with its unrequited attentions. Love that snuck up on him and burrowed inside him alongside the gnarled tree inside him, that never left for long. Love that motivated him to kill, to maim, to hurt, just to see the man of it’s cause. He felt nothing without it, and felt everything in its presence.

 

And for many many years he lived in unrequited desire, loved a man so greatly and yet remained unloveable by him, and he was peaceful with this, so long as his Bat came back, made him feel something, left his bruising marks, and cut anger into his skin and left it there long enough for him to love. So long as his Bat came back to him in seething anger and laid hands on him he was pleased, subdued until the marks grew to dull and old and needed renewing.

 

And then the Bat stopped coming back to him.

 

He had bigger things to deal with, badder men, who called for more attention than the he, and no matter his threats, no matter how loud he screamed, his entire life went uncared for by the Bat, unnoticed, unimportant. The lovemarks become dull old scars, the bruises faded, and the love ached inside him to see something. His hopes to escape become unimportant, because maybe just maybe, the Bat would notice his disappearance, maybe he’d be wrong about the Bat neglecting to pay attention to him.

 

The love did not stop aching for many years.

 

For many years he sat in his sell, scraping blood red bats into the walls. Empty of all but the aching, the laughter no longer echoing through the halls of his home, because the ache would not let him. For many years he was an aching man who could not even draw himself from bed long enough to hurt, to try and bring his love back, a man who only sought to see his shadow clad affection again, and to ache with a different form of pain. He lost who he was in those years, subdued and drawn into something sickly calm and innocent, staring out the window waiting for his Batman to come back to him.

 

But he did not come.

 

He would not come.

They told him no one would come.

 

They told him his love would forever be unrequited.

 

They told him he’d never see the Batman again.

 

They told him the Batman never cared for him.

 

And he believed them. Because nothing over all the years he’d been pining for his Bat’s love had he ever seen any glimpse of it. So he listened to them, let them dis the roots of the hollow ache deeper, make love’s fangs dig in deeper and remind him more that his feelings would not be returned. No one ever told him differently, and did nothing as he dragged himself deeper into this sickly innocent and hurt state.

 

Time passed and he began to grow grey with the pain inside him, the long wisps on his head growing dull and silver. Just as the had reached the sides of his head and started to curl back, he saw something dark and shaded fly over Arkham, and the love in his chest screamed for it. He fought his way to the roof, as violent as he’d been in years, and ran, ran until he reached the roof, and stopped when the figure he saw was not his bat, too young and too thin and too short. He ran before the other could catch him, managed to run out the doors and he ran for Gotham, ran until his lungs burned and his legs grew weak.

 

He ran until he had made his way most the way around Gotham, until he’d found himself in the cemetery, and fell to his knees in front of a grave. The love in his chest constricted up and around his throat, squeezed his heart and choked him until his heart couldn’t take it.

 

And there they found him at dawn, laying on a grave that was not his own, but belonged to someone he wished to call as such, and they washed him away in ashes, to live forever on amongst the depth of demons in unrequited love.


End file.
